My Alpha Boss Smelled My Heat in a Locked Boardroom novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Who in This Room
At the overnight merger signing, Eun-ho's last pill fails, and the CEO lifts his head and asks who is in heat. He clears the room, locks the door, and pins his secretary against the night window.
The last page of the Daon contract was still in Ha Si-wan's hand when Moon Eun-ho's final pill stopped working.
Eun-ho felt it first in his wrists.
It was a slow heat.
It was 2:40 in the morning, the thirty-first floor was sealed for the deal, and the doors wouldn't open until six.
Seven people sat around the long boardroom table.
The Daon chairman, her two lawyers, two Haeryung analysts, the CEO Si-wan, and Eun-ho, his secretary.
Eun-ho stood behind Si-wan's chair with the folder open, the way he had stood for three years.
"Page forty-one," he said. "Initial the margin, then sign."
His voice came out wrong.
It came out low and a little rough, and he put the folder down so nobody would see his hand shake.
For six years Eun-ho had taken one white pill every morning and passed as a beta.
He was really an omega, and nobody at Haeryung Holdings had ever wondered.
Two weeks ago the man who sold him those pills had been raided, and the phone number Eun-ho had for him went dead.
Eun-ho had cut his last ten pills in half, then into quarters.
Tonight's quarter was the end of them.
Si-wan was reading out the escrow clause in his flat, bored, expensive voice.
"The release triggers on the filing date, not the signing date, so Daon cannot..."
He stopped in the middle of the word.
Then he lifted his head, slowly.
Nobody at the table moved.
Si-wan was a dominant alpha, thirty-four years old, in a charcoal suit with his tie already loosened.
His nostrils flared once.
"Who in this room is in heat?"
The silence after it was total.
One of the analysts laughed, a short stupid sound, and then stopped.
The Daon chairman put down her pen.
The heat reached Eun-ho's stomach.
It dropped low and settled there, heavy and bright, and his knees went soft against the back of the chair.
He locked them.
"There's no omega on this floor, sir," Eun-ho said. "It's a beta-only floor. You wrote the policy yourself."
His voice cracked on the last word.
Si-wan turned his head and looked at him.
It was the first time Si-wan had looked at him properly in three years.
"I wrote it for a reason," Si-wan said.
Then he stood.
The chair rolled back and hit Eun-ho's thighs, and the smell of Si-wan hit him at the same time.
Cedar and cold smoke, with something warm and dark underneath.
Eun-ho had been breathing it in secret since the week he was hired.
His vision swam.
One of the lawyers coughed and grabbed the edge of the table.
The Daon chairman was an alpha, too.
Eun-ho saw her pupils blow wide.
"Sign it," Si-wan told her.
"Ha Si-wan..."
"Page forty-one. Sign it now and take your people out."
She signed.
Her pen scratched so hard it tore the paper.
Si-wan took a key card from his inside pocket and pressed it to the panel by the door.
The lock gave one long ugly buzz.
The door swung open on the dark corridor.
"Out," Si-wan said. "All of you."
Nobody argued with him.
The lawyers went first, then the analysts, with their sleeves over their noses.
The Daon chairman stopped in the doorway and looked back at Eun-ho with something that wasn't quite pity.
Then she was gone.
Eun-ho stepped toward the door, too.
"Not you, Secretary Moon."
Eun-ho stopped.
Si-wan crossed the room without hurrying and put his palm flat against the door.
It swung shut.
The lock buzzed.
The lights over the long table dimmed to the faint amber of the night setting.
Seoul glittered silent behind the glass.
Eun-ho stood very still.
"I'll open a window," he said, because it was the only stupid thing he could think of. "The vents..."
"The windows are sealed."
"Then I'll call security."
"The cameras go off at three for the deal."
Si-wan checked his watch.
"It's two forty-six."
He walked toward Eun-ho, and Eun-ho walked backward, until the cold glass met his shoulder blades.
Si-wan put one arm beside Eun-ho's head.
His tie hung between them, black silk gone dark in the amber light.
He wound the end around his fist, once, twice.
"Sir," Eun-ho said. "Please."
He didn't know what he was begging for.
Si-wan lowered his head until his nose was at Eun-ho's throat, beside the collar Eun-ho had buttoned to the top every day for six years.
Si-wan breathed in.
It was long and unsteady, and Eun-ho felt it all the way down his spine.
His hips moved before he could stop them.
It was one small push toward Si-wan, and he heard Si-wan swallow.
"Six years," Si-wan said against his skin. "Three of them three feet from my desk."
His voice had dropped into something Eun-ho had never heard from him.
"I wondered what you'd smell like."
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